25000

Composite of images taken from
our backyard

This weekend, Cabine du Jardin Deux, celebrated a small milestone in passing twenty-five thousand page views.  I first started writing this blog in February 2011 and hope to continue 'interesting' readers from around our world, for as long as the old 'Cabine' resists the ravages of rain, wind and entropy!

I have posted this new image of M13, The Great Globular Star Cluster in the Constellation Hercules, because spookily it is 25000 light years distant from our home planet Earth.  I captured the data for this image some time ago but more recently have managed to increase dynamic range and thus have shown more of the fainter stars in the halo without over-exposing the brighter stars in the core.  M13 should be visible this month from the UK and given a warm clear night I will endeavour to obtain a better photograph of this northern hemisphere astronomical highlight.

M13 was originally discovered by Edmund Halley in 1714.  It contains roughly three hundred thousand stars gravitationaly bound in a sphere approximately 145 light years in diameter.  M13 is associated with the Milkyway Galaxy but is outside its galactic plane.  When we gaze at M13 we are looking out into deep space!

In 1974 humankind used the Arecibo Radio Telescope to send a digital message to the stars.  The message contained encoded information about Homo Sapiens, DNA, atomic numbers and Earth's location in the Universe.  The radio message was beamed towards M13 but will not arrive there for another 24961 years.  So if any one or 'thing' is able to hear our message, we will not be likely to receive a reply for at least 49,961 years;  well that is unless some very smart alien is able to work out how to move information faster than light.

Credits: NASA HST and Wikipedia

Core of M13
Hubble Space Telescope

Arecibo
Message